


A Narrow Shading

by sheafrotherdon



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-01-22
Updated: 2006-01-22
Packaged: 2017-10-11 23:23:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/118303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sheafrotherdon/pseuds/sheafrotherdon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once Regulus takes the Mark, the contradictions of his life become impossible to ignore</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Narrow Shading

Like those who fell to their knees before him, Regulus blacked out long before the skull and serpent bloomed upon his skin.

He struggled to wake from the dreams that followed, set his will against the grasping power coiled behind his ribs. New magic, unfamiliar, ran in his blood and he turned his head, emptied his stomach until there was nothing left to purge. His hand shook as he wiped his mouth, as he sank against the stone-flagged floor and steeled himself for whatever new humiliation was to follow.

But degradation, it seemed, was for the uninitiated - the voices that had jeered as he took his place before the Lord, caressed him now as merest whispers. The hands that had pinned him, fingers curling cruelly into flesh, hovered - gentle - touching his brow as though to gauge fever.

"Welcome, cousin."

He shook his head as though to refuse, but the claim was upon him now. Breath and bone, rite and promise, he was bound to Lucius' reckoning.

He flexed his fingers, felt the Mark rooted in muscle and blood. "Cousin," he whispered, and wished for cowardice enough to sink into oblivion again.

~*~

The magic's presence became familiar, an oily slide of ambition beneath his skin. On days when he resisted the lure of wanton obedience, when he thought of Sirius and regretted the curl of burning parchment, magic would rise restless within him, choking him with obligation. Duty and honour were twisted beasts that visited him in the night.

Yet there were, he discovered, far fewer acts of senseless violence reserved to him than others. His arm bore the stain of new-assumed fealty, but there was a power in his name that a rite could not reduce. He walked through shadowed corridors with the assurance of a Black, cloaked by lineage, money, connections – child of the order Voldemort craved, born before the genesis of the world.

And so, while others learned the subtle rites of _Crucio_ , there was time enough to gather his cousin's child into his arms. "Draco," he murmured, smiling at Narcissa, stunned by the ferocity of her fragile touch. "Heir," he whispered – _to a madman's folly_ \- and kissed the new mother's sleep-soft brow.

~*~

When rebellion came it was not, as he might have expected, borne on the wings of a trembling fury, but lodged instead in the space between each breath as he woke. Startled, convicted, bemused by his certainty, he studied the Mark in the half-light of a February morning, tried to find some vestige of the mantle his family had meant him to assume, inked into the snaking mockery upon his skin. But there was no nobility to find in the imperfect loyalty he'd sworn to Voldemort's fears. No justice lurked behind hood and mask, only terror of discovery and persecution.

(He did not glance at the photographs, clumsily framed and hung on his walls. He needed no prompt to conjure Narcissa's face, to recall the grey-eyed trust of her son).

Like spectral dogs, the doubts that had always worn his brother's smile rose up and seized him, teeth sinking deep. It was no longer enough to evade and mollify, to mitigate what madness he could while staying close to those who loved him. What purity he had left in him, what vestige of blood that was not bound – he must use it, destroy this house of cards, this kingdom of folly rooted in sand.

~*~

He commissioned the portrait before the end, when he felt the breath of his cousins' suspicions against his shoulder. The artist was more than competent; the magic that captured his spirit swift. He found it hard, the forcible stillness, the closing off of thought while his pulse beat rapidly, fuelled by the knowledge of time running short. But the sweep of the brush, the spill of pigment, the curl of his own breath sinking into canvas – each brought comfort, a certain peace to pit against the shadow cast by a hidden locket.

The artist was no master favoured by pure-bloods – Lucius raised the point over dinner one Thursday, squeezing the observation into small talk passed between the guinea fowl and figs. Regulus sipped from his wine glass, nodded his head in acquiescence and betrayed no surprise that Lucius knew his movements. "That is, perhaps, the point of my choice," he suggested, Barolo heavy against his tongue. "We would rouse our traditions from the slough of complacency, would we not?"

His answer – and his willingness to lead a group of lesser Death Eaters in a spree of spiteful havoc, tearing through the Norfolk plains - bought him time enough to see his portrait to completion. He wrote instructions on a scrap of brown paper, pressed the note and a handful of galleons into the artist's hand.

He wasn't surprised it was Bella sent to kill him, dogging his steps with a passion long since robbed of sense. With the heel of his wand a pressure against his palm, he felt no fear – only weariness, regret, a sibling sense of impotent loss. He fought with what energy their restless dance left him, and screamed his dying into a thankless night.

~*~

He watches her age from the comfort of a gilded frame. It was Lucius' wish he have pride of place on the south wall of the parlour - afternoon sun, he whispered to Narcissa; penance, he smirked to Regulus himself.

Yet what grief there was in bearing witness to her life without him, cannot compare to the joy of this hour. The boy who was his all-but son has bared his arm, defied his father. The wand in his hand is steady and sure, and there is more Black in the spill of this white-blond hair than in the fragment of a soul still trapped between oils.

There is no flare of sickening green – there was none when his own end arrived. The vagaries of magic lost between pain and ecstasy, the narrow shading of life into death – there is artistry in the sweep of a wand as much as the press of a brush to a canvas. Lucius falls, and Regulus closes his hand with quiet pride.

There is hope enough in the world to make him glad.


End file.
